Academic Essay Writing: Things You Must Know
Take your academic essay writing seriously. If you move on in your education, there will be many more essays to write. Get the knowledge and skills you need now so you don’t find yourself struggling through each essay. At some point in time you may be writing a thesis or dissertation. The skills you learn from writing essays will help you in your career as well.
Academic essays are commonly assigned in University. Your professor will expect to see you are proficient in the following areas, which will be evidenced by the quality of your written work:
- that you have an understanding of the course material
- you have done an adequate amount of research
- your analysis is thorough and logical
- you exhibit good writing skills
In order to accomplish this, there are some steps you should follow to get you on the right track. Some students prefer to just jump right in and start writing. The fault in that method is you could have spent a lot of time doing something that turns out to be unproductive. Here are 7 steps you must know for quality academic writing:
- Take a close look at your essay prompt (essay question) and decide your plan. What is your purpose? What do the key words in the prompt really mean? Make sure you fully understand what is being asked of you.
- Researching and reading are how you will gather the information you need to write your academic paper. Now that you are clear and focused on what your essay question is asking you to write, your research direction will be much more exact.
- Take notes as you read and research, making sure you keep track of the sources for each one. This will save you tons of time later.
- Now that you have done all the background work it’s time to start creating your essay. You need a central idea, also called a thesis. This is important because it controls the writing of the entire essay. All your main points should point toward the thesis statement.
- Organize all the notes you made from the research. Find a logical pattern to fit them into. The main points will become chapter headings or main headings. All other points should fit into one of the main headings and they will be different paragraphs within each heading.
- Write your rough draft. Don’t try to be perfect as you write because it will slow you down too much. Just start writing and let it flow. The next step is for editing and revising.
- Revise your written work. Go through it yourself and correct what you can see. After that, get someone else who is good at writing to read and revise for you. Take a look at their revisions and incorporate the ones you think are applicable.